- Plant designer export to the greenspace simulation requires manual steps (aka not functional unless you want to rename and edit files manually)- The soils department is subject to a complete redesign- The new raytraced plants don't show a yearly cycle of changes yet- The "Green Appelar" tree is misconfigured, better don't use it.

Hints:

- Trees are planted small and grow over the time of several ( = 4) simulated years.

Edit:

- The "Green Appelar" tree is misconfigured, better don't use it.

I've fixed that. If you've gotten the original "greenspace_r4.zip" and it seems important enough to you, you can now download the new "greenspace_r4a.zip" with the fix (actually the tree was not only misconfigured, some images were missing altogether):

Are these only images included in your application, which were generated by the raytracer, we saw before?Why mot make it cool, and let it ray-trace on-the-fly, in the background.So it reads the script, creates the random tree geometry and finally raytraces it and gives it to the applicaiton, just when you click "generate tree" or something similar...

The trees were made with a script that generates a scene for the PovRay raytracer ( http://www.povray.org )

The greenspace simulation is based on an old map editor code of mine which underwent several reincarnations, but stayed a 2D/bitmap/sprite based application. So behind the scenes it's all just bitmaps.

Tracing these plants is somewhat time consuming, both with PovRay and my selfmade raytracer. But on modern computers it doesn't take hours anymore, but less than a minute to generate a plant or tree. With PovRay I have a problem though that it needs several steps to trace the plant, generate a mask, and another pass to generate a ground shadow for it. I haven't automated this process fully yet. With my own tracer I get the bitmaps in the right format right away, but I must first write some more turtle scripts for plants.

Maybe some day I can render the plants behind the scenes once the player chooses a type, location and view

At the moment all the images are genrated before a release and stored in the "tiles.tica.zip" archive. You can open that with my tilemaster application:

I think at some day I must bundle tilemaster with the gardening simulation, since that is the only easy way to include new bitmaps which were not made by the plant designer/inbuilt raytracer. Well most of the tilemaster code is already in the last release, so it won't be a big step.

Edit: The last release of tilemaster has a problem with some of the really big images late in the tileset. You need to set the canvas size to about 1500x1500 pixels to see them. There shouldn't happen anything bad, though. I fixed the bug in the code meanwhile, but didn't publish a new tilemaster release yet.

After some struggling with vector math, the raytracer can now build intersection and difference objects from other basic objects (CSG). I bet there are still a lot of bugs lurking, but it was a step forward.

Also, a new plant script, to create snowdrops:

The flower bell needs more detail, but since this is a tiny sort of plant, it shouldn't matter much. I need to add an interface to the scripting language to set the shinyness of the surfaces, and the amount of ambient light they receive. This way I could make the flower appear softer white.

Some years ago I was quite hooked on povray.I once created a script that would generate a randomized building with each and every brick modeled with slightly randomized positioning to make it look natural. It took quite some time to make it even finish without running out of memory... which meant that my idea to render a whole generated city with that never came to be

The brick house presumably worked as well as my pine with each needle modeled as a small object. It worked fine till I wanted to place a second pine in a scene, and my PC ran out of memory. PovRay is very interesting for sure, though.

For trading I'll need to set up a database somewhere, and an auction-like interface where one can enter offers and bids. I once spent a day or two on this and noticed it's quite some work. Collaborative editing of a map (via network) will be less work, but I haven't done anything serious in that direction yet.

At the moment it's in the stage of creating tools, though. The script-based plant designer, also a small bitmap editor to postprocess the rendered plants, or just create bitmap-based plants and map objects. And finally a better map editor.

I don't know if this ever will get somewhere. The ideas are very far flung, and the scope that I've sketched above is quite big. For the moment it's fine though to see the plant designer get more versatile and powerful and make simple arrangements of plants with the map editor.

I like povray as well but I found it a bit tricky to use it as a sub-module for rendering things in windows. The runner (at that time) sometimes popped up an annoying dialog box.I modified the code for it but then it is not ok to distribute it any longer according to the povray license.

A while I had been pondering about using Povray this way, but I didn't like the idea of having to ship platform dependent binaries with a Java utility. IMO it kills one of the core benefits of java, the ease of installation/running on multiple platforms.

IIRC you can distribute modified Povray executables though, as long as you make clear that they are modified by you, and that the original team is not responsible for support. IIRC there is/has been MegaPov, an extended version of Povray which was distributed, so it should be possible.

No problem to make it lighter. Seems I'm used to autumn/winter being rather dark seasons ... I'll test a lighter shade to see if that looks better. (Winter I have configured off currently, I'm fed up with having real winter, that's bad enough).

The seasonal plant cycle thing is cool. Are they animated or does it pop between one state and the next?

There is only limited animation. Plants can be made with any number of frames, which are spread through the year, but in the demo there are only 3 to 7 frames per plant, so the changes from one state to the next are quite strong.

I love your tools. Man, if I was to make those, I'd be spending years...but then you have a lot of experience with Swing. Love your scroll-bars

Thank you very much, but it's really not that special

Most of my stuff has old roots. If you've been toying around with games, tools and demos for 15 years or so, you just have a big repository of code snippets which you can reuse. And the scrollbars are just from the "Nimbus" look and feel that comes with Java since a while

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